We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Friday, January 17. 2014

If President Obama really wants to set us on a course to greater income mobility, he could confront head-on the problem of father absence, perhaps in his January 28 State of the Union address. But instead, after $20 trillion in real spending on the War on Poverty, I anticipate we’ll hear a public call for still more federal spending aimed at aiding “our neediest citizens,” or overcoming income inequality through new government-led reforms.

What were the programs proposed by Lyndon Johnson that envisioned an America without poor people? They included not one program that transferred wealth from one slice of society to another to reduce poverty. They were job programs, education and skill training and legal help to gain access to housing and jobs. These included Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA), Job Corps, Head Start, GED programs, and Community Action Agencies to bring the poor, with programs they helped design, into the mainstream. Whether these were the right strategies -- and I now have my doubts -- they did not include trillions for a bailout to help people stay self-sufficient. For us now to say the War on Poverty was a success because we handed out the financial resources to alleviate poverty is a gross misunderstanding of the war in order to support the conclusion the war was at least in part won.

Many people in America do not mind relative poverty. Money isn't everything; freedom and self-determination is a lot, and the most important thing in the US.

We lost Johnson's war on poverty big time, and are now paying reparations (benefits) to the winners who, while still in poverty on paper, are enjoying immensely the middle class lifestyle their bennies provide.

" If President Obama really wants to set us on a course to greater income mobility ..."

Stop right there. The Preznit is the chief trashman and street sweeper and other such dirty jobs. Including being the CiC, it's still just a dirty job. Jobs that are very necessary if the Blessings of Liberty are to be secured for ourselves and our posterity.

All of government is just dirty jobs. It doesn't add value to our civliization, it can't improve it. Let me repeat, Government does not add value to our civilization. The best it can do, is keep the place cleaned up and vanquish the barbarians at the gate.

Our current President is one guy, who's not very smart, and has not the slighted idea of what is best. Nor does he have the capability, either by himself or the team he has surrounded himself with, to make reasonably cood choices on how best with limited resources to keep it cleaned up and defend our Liberties.

And he and his minons have no interest in doing that anyway. The only thing they care about, is how to usurp our powers that we have loaned to our government, to force their will upon us. As if they actually know what's best for us.

Kings and dictators alway think that, and so eggs must be broken to create beautiful omelettes. And you will like that omelette, or you will be disposed of for the good of all.

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